Make America Mine Again… and Only Mine!

Make America Mine Again… and Only Mine!

The Spoils System Redux

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant, in the administrative state; replace them with our people.” 

J.D. Vance, as a Senate candidate in 2021

Vance’s admonition is now one of the most important tenets of Trump 2024 platform. Long ago, I asked myself what the value was to a federal bureaucracy. I soon realized that bureaucracy actually slows rash and emotional legislative and executive decisions, avoiding tons of easily expected consequences… requiring that the nation think before it acts under unnecessarily extreme popular sentiment, often stirred up by leaders seeking more power. Look at the lessons of our ultimately futile and embarrassing loss of the Vietnam War.

The post-humiliation aftermath of that failed war resulted in a pile of statutory limitations on presidential war-making power. Yet, a little more than a month after 9/11/01, the USA Patriot Act repealed all those post-Vietnam war power-limiting statutes. We can see what happened, as Congress was backed into a corner where declaring war was the only political choice they really had. They believed that they had to contain the “imminent” threat of a dictator with “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs, that turned out to be non-existent).

This Patriot Act repeal of limits on presidential power and was introduced to Congress on a Friday, without the usual debate, and passed on the immediately following Monday… based on a 300+ page document drafted years earlier by G.W. Bush’s VP, Dick Cheney. I doubt most members of Congress even read it. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t really go as planned. Thousands dead and trillions spent, and ????

Well, we’re baaack at that effort to kill that professional and educated bureaucracy, as the Supreme Court seems to be doing as the “Chevron deference” accorded by judges to educated specialists within the federal agencies is being denigrated and denied. Yes, that ethics/corruption impaired rightwing Supreme Court lets us all know that Trump is still having his way with America… through that “we love you Donald” majority. That effort to purge Trump opponents from government is the Siren Song of MAGA politicians to replace federal administrative competence with blind loyalty to MAGA doctrine. How many of Trump’s officials, advisors and followers have been convicted or are awaiting trial?

History has taught of this us this lesson of power-abuse danger many times. As an early example, “while the first presidents were concerned with the competence and honesty of civil service employees, [Andrew] Jackson quickly set aside those concerns… Instead of hiring those who wanted to work for the public interest and the good of the nation, Jackson employed members of his political party who pledged to march in lockstep with him and his policies. This became known as the ‘spoils system.’” The Conversation, July 12th.

Another example is Donald Trump’s 2018 unilateral withdrawal the US from the nuclear accord that had contained Iran’s weapons-grade nuclear enrichment program (which was successful according to our own military leaders), promising us that Iran would come back, on bended knee, and accept a much more powerful treaty. They didn’t. Greater sanctions were tried. Iran found new allies and pushed back. Look around the Middle East today, as Iran’s surrogates are having their way with Red Sea shipping, Israel as well as dwindling US influence in the region. Also: “Iran has further increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels in defiance of international demands, a confidential report by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Thursday [8/29].

“The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, reviewed by the Associated Press, said that as of Aug. 17, Iran has 363.1 pounds of uranium enriched up to 60%. That’s an increase of 49.8 pounds since the IAEA’s last report in May… Uranium enriched up to 60% purity is just a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. By IAEA’s definition, around 92.5 pounds of uranium enriched to 60% is the amount at which creating one atomic weapon is theoretically possible — if the material is enriched further to 90%.

“The IAEA chief, Rafael Mariano Grossi, has previously warned that Tehran has enough uranium enriched to near-weapons-grade levels to make ‘several’ nuclear bombs if it chose to do so. He has acknowledged the U.N. agency cannot guarantee that none of Iran’s centrifuges may have been peeled away for clandestine enrichment.” Los Angeles Times, August 31st. Donald Trump calls refers to our Civil Servants as the “deep state.” What he wants is a new “deep state” that reports only to him. His open plan is to fire vast pools of competent government employees, “pledging if elected in November to replace career civil servants with his like-minded allies…

“The U.S. operated for much of the 1800s on the understanding that individuals won jobs with the government not by proving their expertise, but by having connections to presidents and their parties… Congress moved to eliminate the spoils system in 1883, about 18 months after a disgruntled job-seeker assassinated the man he believed owed him a government appointment — James A. Garfield, the 20th president of the United States… ‘You’re now talking about 140 years of presidential administrations — Republicans and Democrats — who all supported the proposition that the best way to get an effective government was to have a career, professional, merit-based civil service,’ said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that analyzes federal agencies and their employees. ‘So the idea that we would convert that, or return to a 19th-century-style spoils system, is a huge anomaly. It’s a radical change.’…

“In the waning months of his tenure, Trump created a category of employees deemed to have some say over policy. The Republican administration asked all federal agencies to report back which employees should be placed on a new ‘Schedule F’ that would classify them as at-will employees who can quit or be fired at any time, for any reason.

“But Trump left office before Schedule F could be completed and veteran civil servants ejected. President Biden reversed the policy shortly after taking office. And federal regulations approved this spring attempt to make it harder for Trump or any future president to expand the universe of workers who can be canned so easily… The American Federation of Government Employees (or AFGE), representing 750,000 workers across many unions, said the Trump policy would erase employee protections for up to half a million senior managers, high-level technical specialists, physicians and others.

“Those senior workers would not only lose collective bargaining rights laid out in the law, but the change would eviscerate ‘the apolitical, merit-based system we have today’ and replace it with ‘a corrupt spoils system,’ Jacque Simon, AFGE’s public policy director, said in a union publication.” James Rainey for the August 31st Los Angeles Times. Trump has spent his life as a scammer, from the fraud he called “Trump University” to the way he valued his properties (one… low… for the tax man… and one high… for lenders)… the total list is very long. But he is a very popular scammer with a way with people who want simple and immediate solutions for complex problems or simply to replace the Constitution with an evangelical Bible.

I’m Peter Dekom, and a Trump second term could create the greatest Ponzi scheme on Earth, but instead of their net worth, his victims would lose their country.